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Justice Dept. Shelved Ideas to Improve Gun Background Checks

WASHINGTON — After the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and others at a supermarket in Tucson in early 2011, the Justice Department drew up a detailed list of steps the government could take to expand the background-check system in order to reduce the risk of guns falling into the hands of mentally ill people and criminals.

Most of the proposals, though, were shelved at the department a year ago as the election campaign heated up and as Congress conducted a politically charged investigation into the Operation Fast and Furious gun trafficking case, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations. It is not clear which, if any, of the conclusions were relayed to the White House.

It is far from clear whether any of the proposals — which centered on improving the background check system, and did not call for banning weapons — could have prevented the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday. But the recommendations could provide a blueprint if the Obama administration chooses to take more aggressive steps to curb gun violence.

President Obama, in his weekly address on Saturday, said he wanted to take “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this; regardless of the politics.” He did not, however, give any details. The Justice Department’s list included several measures that, even if Congress did not act, Mr. Obama could enact by executive order.

It is far from certain, however, that the White House would be willing to wage a fight against the powerful gun-rights lobby or take attention from competing concerns, like negotiations over the looming fiscal deadline. While Mr. Obama’s words hinted at new steps to curb gun violence, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and other gun-control advocates said they fell short of a concrete response.

Political pressure on the White House is building in some quarters of the Democratic Party. Representative John B. Larson, Democrat of Connecticut, for example, called for Congress to pass measures requiring background checks on all gun sales, as well as banning assault rifles and high-capacity clips.

“To do nothing in the face of pending disaster is to be complicit,” Mr. Larson said. “It’s time to act. It’s time to vote.”

Americans remain closely divided on the issue of gun rights, but public support for stricter gun-control laws has waned since 2008, according to several polls taken before the shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The Justice Department’s study, according to people familiar with the deliberations, did not focus on new restrictions on the kinds of weapons that most law-abiding Americans may purchase, on the premise that those would be nearly impossible to push through Congress.

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President Obama called for nonpartisan “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies” like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School.Credit
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Instead, it focused on ways to bolster the database the F.B.I. uses for background checks on gun purchasers, including using information on file at other federal agencies. Certain people are barred from buying guns, including felons, drug users, those adjudicated mentally “defective,” illegal immigrants and people convicted of misdemeanor offenses related to domestic violence.

For example, the study recommended that all agencies that give out benefits, like the Social Security Administration, tell the F.B.I. background-check system whenever they have made arrangements to send a check to a trustee for a person deemed mentally incompetent to handle his own finances, or when federal employees or job applicants fail a drug test. It also proposed setting up a system to appeal such determinations.

Although advocates for gun rights and privacy protection would probably object to the sharing of such information among agencies, the Justice Department concluded such activity would be lawful and appropriate.

The study also proposed Congressional action, including increasing grants to states as an incentive to voluntarily submit their own law enforcement information to the database — to about $100 million a year, up from about $11 million this year.

The recommendations also included asking Congress to enact a law to expand the list of transactions subject to background checks — currently required only for purchases from a licensed firearms dealer — by requiring private sellers to check buyers’ backgrounds too; the idea was to require them to go to a dealer and use its background check system for a small fee.

Finally, the study envisioned asking Congress to increase criminal penalties — with a mandatory minimum prison sentence — for people who act as “straw” buyers for others who would have been blocked by a background check.

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The White House and Justice Department would not comment on the study.

The study’s recommendations are consistent with broad remarks by Mr. Obama in an opinion article published in The Arizona Daily Star in March 2011, about two months after the Tucson shooting involving Ms. Giffords. In it, Mr. Obama called for improvements in enforcing the existing ban on the sale of guns to certain categories of people.

He wrote that he was “willing to bet that responsible, law-abiding gun owners” would agree to “common sense” ideas, including “that we should check someone’s criminal record before he can check out at a gun seller; that an unbalanced man shouldn’t be able to buy a gun so easily; that there’s room for us to have reasonable laws that uphold liberty, ensure citizen safety and are fully compatible with a robust Second Amendment.”

Mr. Obama made similar comments in a speech in July after another mass shooting, at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

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Flags were lowered to half-staff at the Washington Monument on Friday after the shootings at a school in Connecticut.Credit
Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

Back around March 2011, officials said, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asked Christopher Schroeder, then the assistant attorney general for legal policy, to examine gun control and background checks.

Mr. Schroeder and his aides, working with the criminal division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, spent the next year developing ideas and recommendations. They also met with gun-safety advocates and police chiefs, and attended conferences about the F.B.I. database, known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

They were said to have presented their recommendations in a series of meetings a year to nine months ago with senior department officials, including Mr. Holder and his deputy, James Cole. But the proposals were largely filed away without action amid a harsh political environment against gun control.

At the time, congressional Republicans and conservative news media outlets were carrying out a withering campaign against Mr. Holder based on accusations — found to be false by the department’s independent inspector general — that he had sanctioned the reckless “gun walking” tactics, not moving swiftly to interdict illegal weapons, used in the Operation Fast and Furious gun trafficking case, including floating theories that it was all part of a conspiracy meant to crack down on gun rights.

Still, an administration official pointed to smaller steps taken last spring to improve the background check system, including automating a system that feeds information about federal indictments, convictions and arrest warrants into the database; previously it was entered by hand.

Mr. Schroeder, who stepped down from his position last month to return to teaching at Duke University law school, confirmed that he had conducted the larger project.

“We have identified ways to improve the effectiveness of the background check system that we concluded would be positive and constructive and help meet the president’s objective of keeping more guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals,” Mr. Schroeder said. “I’m hopeful that some of these can move forward and actually be implemented.”

Some of the proposals would attempt to improve on longstanding ideas. For example, after a Virginia Tech student killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in 2007, it emerged that a state judge had deemed him mentally ill, but that information was not in the F.B.I. database.

In 2008, Congress called upon federal agencies that might know whether someone is mentally ill to make sure the F.B.I. database had that information. But most agencies that have such information — as varied as Social Security and the Railroad Retirement Board — have yet to comply.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, by contrast, does share its data about instances in which benefit checks are sent to a trustee because a recipient has been deemed mentally incompetent. Republicans in Congress have introduced a bill, the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, that would end the practice.

Mark Landler contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Justice Dept. Shelved Ideas to Improve Gun Background Checks. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe